satisfaction.  One of her friends, whom she highly honoured and loved, and of whose hospitable house, and pleasant gardens, she was allowed the freest use, was the late excellent Mrs. Stephens, of Sodbury in Gloucestershire, whose feat she celebrated in a poem inscribed to her, inserted in the collection she published.  A lady, that was worthy of the highest commendation her muse could bestow upon her.  The fine use she made of solitude, the few following lines me wrote on it, will be an honourable testimony to her.

  Sweet solitude, the Muses dear delight,
  Serene thy day, and peaceful is thy night! 
  Thou nurse of innocence, fair virtue’s friend,
  Silent, tho’ rapturous, pleasures thee attend. 
  Earth’s verdant scenes, the all surrounding skies
  Employ my wondring thoughts, and feast my eyes,
  Nature in ev’ry object points the road,
  Whence contemplation wings my soul to God. 
  He’s all in all.  His wisdom, goodness, pow’r,
  Spring in each blade, and bloom in ev’ry flow’r,
  Smile o’er the meads, and bend in ev’ry hill,
  Glide in the stream, and murmur in the rill
  All nature moves obedient to his will. 
  Heav’n shakes, earth trembles, and the forests nod,
  When awful thunders speak the voice of God.

However, notwithstanding her love of retirement, and the happy improvement she knew how to make of it, yet her firm belief that her station was the appointment of providence, and her earnest desire of being useful to her relations, whom she regarded with the warmest affection, brought her to submit to the fatigues of her business, to which, during thirty-five years, she applied herself with, the utmost diligence and care.

Amidst such perpetual avocations, and constant attention to business, her improvements in knowledge, and her extensive acquaintance with the best writers, are truly surprising.  But she well knew the worth of time, and eagerly laid hold of all her leisure hours, not to lavish them away in fashionable unmeaning amusements; but in the pursuit of what she valued infinitely more, those substantial acquisitions of true wisdom and goodness, which she knew were the noblest ornaments of the reasonable mind, and the only sources of real and permanent happiness:  and she was the more desirous of this kind of accomplishments, as she had nothing in her shape to recommend her, being grown, by an accident in her childhood, very irregular in her body, which she had resolution enough often to make the subject of her own pleasantry, drawing this wise inference from it, “That as her person would not recommend her, she must endeavour to cultivate her mind, to make herself agreeable.”

And indeed this she did with the greatest care; and she had so many excellent qualities in her, that though her first appearance could never create any prejudice in her favour, yet it was impossible to know her without valuing and esteeming her.